In every field there is a need for writing where the main objective is to extend the reader's field of acquaintance with the complex cases of the rea… - Kenneth E. Boulding

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In every field there is a need for writing where the main objective is to extend the reader's field of acquaintance with the complex cases of the real world. Such writing does not have to be very exact or quantitative; it does not even have to formulate or to demonstrate hypotheses. It constitutes, as it were, travel over the field of study. Travel is certainly not enough, even for a geographer, but we would feel, I imagine, that a geographer who had never travelled would be under a serious handicap. Similarly the student of organizations who has never, even vicariously through reading, been in a hospital, a bank, a research laboratory, a large corporation, a Soviet factory, a revolution, an Egyptian civil service department, and so on, has missed something. His generalizations are apt to be based on too narrow a selection of the field.

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About Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Ewart Boulding (18 January 1910 – 18 March 1993) was an economist, educator, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist and interdisciplinary philosopher. He was cofounder of General Systems Theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. He was married to .

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Native Name: Kenneth Ewart Boulding
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Populations interact, some decline to extinction, and some expand. In an ice age the tundra advances on the forest, but in no sense is there a "struggle" between them. As the temperature gets colder, the forest species decline and the tundra species increase; that is all. There is neither effort nor fight. As we move toward the more complex animals, of course, both effort and fighting become more common, but even in the predator-prey relationship, there is catching and eating rather than fighting.

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